New Delhi: Many organisations in the development sector that worked with Muslims did not want to acknowledge that they did so, and then there were some who did not want to work with them at all.
Activist and author Farah Naqvi said she realised the sombre truth during her research for her new book, Working with Muslims: Beyond Burqa and Triple Talaq, that was released by former vice president Hamid Ansari on Tuesday.
The issue of the “flattening” of Muslim identity in India echoed in the packed hall of the India International Centre where an eminent panel discussed the book, which investigates the reality of NGOs and their developmental work with Muslims in eight major states of India.
Written in collaboration with the Sadhbhavna Trust, the book, published by Three Essays Collective, studies 373 NGOs and their work with Muslims. Of the 373, 79 are from Uttar Pradesh.
Holding out the view that Muslims in India “specially suffer from identity-based discrimination and sporadic violence”, former Ansari said there was need to discard the virus of considering Muslims with “apprehension, intolerance and otherness”.
A major section of the Muslim community was “poor, powerless and had no access to amenities and opportunities,” he said, urging the government to address these issues.
Noting that Muslims constitute 14.2% of the country’s population, he demanded that focussed affirmative action be taken to provide the community with development opportunities by embracing their problems politically, socially and economically.
Ansari – whose remarks on the the pitfalls of aggressive nationalism and growing intolerance just before demitting office prompted a veiled attack by Prime Minister Modi and cruder salvoes from other BJP leaders, including M. Venkaiah Naidu – also referred to the 2006 Sachar report which stated that Muslims suffered from “multiple development deficits”.
As for the book, he said, it throws new light on the work being done for the community. Ansari pointed out how non-government organisations (NGOs) have stepped in to fill the gaps for the deprived, especially in fields related to health, education and empowerment.
In this regard, the former vice-president said Naqvi has rightly concluded that “the constitutional promise of equality is only achievable when development reaches the last in line”.
Muslims invisibilised
Discussing people’s fear of working with Muslims even on issues such as developmental work, Naqvi said she found during her research that a large number of organisations worked with the community but didn’t want anyone to acknowledge it.
“There were also an equal number of organisations who simply did not want to work with Muslims in the first place,” Naqvi said during the discussion. The high profile audience included actor Sharmila Tagore, former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah, former chief election commissioner Wajahat Habibullah and women’s movement veteran Kamla Bhasin.
Farah Naqvi and Harsh Mander. Credit: Yashas Chandra
A large number of organisations that we interviewed would ask, “Muslims? ‘We don’t know the identity map of the people we work with we don’t know if they are Hindus, Muslims Christians, Dalits… we just know that they are poor’,” Naqvi told the gathering.
She quoted another respondent as telling her that studying the impact on Muslims was a divisive way of looking at development.
According to Naqvi, it was not just because of the present “aggressive political environment” that people want to hide the fact that they worked with Muslims.
The baggage of secularism necessitates the flattening of all identities beyond those of poor – even those identities that add to the layer of discrimination and impoverishment – and this at a time when Muslims in mainstream politics, both at the level of representation and national concern, are being invisibilised and marginalised, she said.
Social activist Harsh Mander, who was also on the panel, said that after the Partition this was the most difficult time for a Muslim to be in India.
Fear has settled into the hearts and souls of Muslims across region, caste, class and gender, he said. “This is the kind of stories I hear from my travels across the country Koi phone train mein kare toh as-salamu alaykum nahi kehna’ (Don’t say salaam-aleikum if someone calls while you are travelling on a train). Don’t get into a fight. Don’t get into an argument. Keep your head as low as possible.”
The former IAS officer added that there are 180 million Muslims and they are central to the imagination of India, to its creation and to its future.
The BJP is the first ruling party that has no Muslim representative in the Lok Sabha and is happy about it and the BJP can do that. But Muslims have become castaways and political untouchables for other political parties too,” said Mander.
Scholar Hilal Ahmed welcomed Naqvi’s book for the data and case studies it had brought into the public domain. He lamented the paucity of scholarly research on the actual situation of Muslims on the ground.
Siddharth Varadarajan, a founder-editor of the The Wire, said there is an “endless cycle of poison” in the public sphere against Muslims.
It was Union culture minister Mahesh Sharma who had said that “A.P.J. Abdul Kalam musalman hote hue bhi itne bade desh bhakt the‘ (Despite being a Muslim, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was a nationalist) – and this is something he said while allegedly praising the former president,” he said.
“Now, in any self-respecting democracy such a minister would not have survived in his job but here we forgot about it and he has gone out to make other statements, he said.
Varadarajan also questioned the Modi government’s “smartly coined slogan” of ‘ Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas’ and said it has a coded message.
“It means that others were favoured until now, others have been appeased, and we are stopping that appeasement under the garb of flattening out identities.”
He added that the term “appeasement” should have been “retired hurt in 2006” when the Rajinder Sachar Committee came out with its data, revealing the dismal social, economic and educational conditions of the Muslim community in the country.
With inputs from PTI